Sinners Welcome: Poems Read online

I pray for: Lord, before my own death,

  let me learn from this animal’s deep release

  into my arms. Let me cease to fear

  the embrace that seeks to still me.

  COAT HANGER BENT INTO HALO

  Gathering up my mother’s clothes for the poor,

  I find the coathanger that almost aborted me,

  or so I dub it—the last hand clung to the high rod.

  Unwound, it could have poked

  through the pink, puckered hole of her cervix

  to spill me before I got going good.

  Instead, from the furred litter of souls squirming

  to be visible, I was picked.

  May I someday spy Mother’s poppy-studded hat

  on the skull of a street-corner gospel singer

  swarming with sores. May I twist from this black wire

  a halo to crown my son’s head.

  LAST LOVE

  For years I chose the man to suit the instant,

  from good guy to goat boy,

  dreadlocked to crewcut. Not one could bridal me.

  In place of lace veil,

  I peered from bandage gauze. And if,

  in rage, some suitor

  tore that off, the red sun was a scald, and I felt

  scalped and rocket-shot

  onto the nearest flight. So everyone I kissed

  left hurt. One man broke

  the table I served him bread on. Another

  claimed my heart

  was arsenic at its core. When my last love came,

  he slid a palm across

  mine eyes, lent me his mouth

  (a bitten plum)

  lay his head in the middle of me, bent me

  to that. Nights now,

  my face rests on the meadow of his chest—

  so I’m a loose-petaled poppy

  blown open, a girl again, for the first time

  hearing the earth’s heartbeat.

  THE ICE FISHERMAN

  Because Grandpa Joe pronounced way

  long ago, They’s fish

  big as Cadillacs down there, the ice fisherman

  hacked a hole

  and stood above a slush abyss

  in steel-toed boots. Headphoned to the Pops—

  engrossed, he couldn’t hear the spider cracks.

  When the river chasmed under him,

  it was a blind

  plunge into white flame, headphones

  drifting down to silt. He rolled like a walrus,

  body chub keeping him up

  as green currents pulled him seaward at a tilt.

  He felt the scarf his wife had knit an iron noose.

  He failed to feel his hands.

  His numb lips pressed to the river’s spine, to suck

  slid inches of air.

  When he skimmed under the town rink,

  music blurred and bored into his hurt ears.

  Maybe some grappling hook wielded by solid citizens

  would boost him, heave him

  steaming onto the ice like a calved seal.

  But the skaters’ blades just cut scrollwork above his face.

  Their blades went whisk, and he went out of reach.

  Then out of his red mouth hole

  he hollered up.

  His dumb heart slowed.

  All this was very swift, and by the time

  the great gray fish with mandarin whiskers

  nosed his hand, he didn’t know

  it wasn’t the stony ghost of Grandpa Joe,

  or that his every filament

  was being reeled to the burnished floor

  of Heaven, where he’d be

  hoisted up to show.

  DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE CRUCIFIXION

  To be crucified is first to lie down

  on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out

  on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes

  fix you into place.

  Once the cross props up and the pole stob

  sinks vertically in an earth hole, perhaps

  at an awkward list, what then can you blame for hurt

  but your own self’s burden?

  You’re not the figurehead on a ship. You’re not

  flying anywhere, and no one’s coming to hug you.

  You hang like that, a sack of flesh with the hard

  trinity of nails holding you into place.

  Thus hung, your rib cage struggles up

  to breathe until you suffocate. If God

  permits this, one wonders if some less

  than loving watcher

  watches us. The man on the cross

  under massed thunderheads feels

  his soul leak away, then surge. Some wind

  sucks him into the light stream

  in the rent sky, and he’s snatched back, held close.

  RED-CIRCLED WANT AD FOR MY SON ON HIS COMMENCEMENT

  The cabdriver wants a job where he can play

  head-banging music loud, the director

  to flicker forever on each skull’s screen.

  The scholar wants the whole oceanic mystery

  to radiate from the next flipped page.

  The drummer wants to keep time,

  to beat it, the President to leave scorched

  imprints of his oily dollar sign in every flaming

  foreign field. I only want strafe bombers

  to drop zillions of my books

  over stadium and glen and rice

  paddy, to satisfy the citizens who scream

  for whatever streams from my Razorpoint,

  plus for my son never to suffer

  a knife tear in the frail

  fabric of self, and to reckon

  this loud, head-banging

  world is a bequest no labor can earn.

  SON’S ROOM

  After my son left for college, come dusk,

  I used to sit in his room painted green

  like the first shoot of any plant,

  caterpillar green, neon green of unripe papaya.

  There was no stuffed polar bear to hold nor illustrated book

  whose valley I could wander down;

  no laundry heap—no shirt an acre wide

  I had to steam an iron across; no gunboat soccer shoes

  to scrape mud off; no posters of beachball-breasted girls

  urging him to sling on his backpack

  and hop a train the length of Italy

  to the topless beach.

  The walls were bare, the windows losing light.

  If you’ve never been a kid, and choose to raise one, know

  he’ll wind up raising you. From whatever small drop

  of care you start out with, he’ll have to grow an ocean

  and you a boat on which to sail from yourself

  forever, else you’ll both drown.

  From his desk, I’d stare across the courtyard

  while night dragged its tide across the stones.

  Once the fire escape vanished, I’d reenter the sarcophagus

  my drinking boxed me in when he was a baby whose cry

  ripped through the swathe of ether I hid in,

  and the certain, struggling

  substance of him helped to my shoulder

  did birth me to this flesh,

  each luminous dawn

  he grinned up and eventually down

  to me from his towering height—each breath

  that filled him freed me

  from my own ribcage.

  EASTER AT AL QAEDA BODEGA

  At the gold speckled counter, my pal in white apron—

  index finger tapping his Arabic paper,

  where the body count dwarfs the one in my Times—announces,

  You’re killing my people.

  But in Hell’s Kitchen, even the Antichrist

  ought to have coffee—one cream

  and two sugars. Blessings

  upon you, he says, and means it.
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  GARMENT DISTRICT SWEATSHOP

  Through the plate glass, a vast concrete field of machines

  repeating like war crosses on the Expressway

  graveyard you pass coming in from the airport—so many.

  You must be bred small

  to fit such a slot.

  Through the needle’s eye a thread stabs

  a slit void. You’re on one side

  then the other, where work gets done, gears engage.

  Your wiry frame must bend like a fishhook

  and hold there. Your black hair must convey restraint

  with its ponytail or chopped bowl cut

  or snake snarl at the nape.

  That’s at eyelevel, but below the hummingbird engines

  of the work surface, the women dip into cool water.

  It’s a secret level where each woman

  insists on using her free hand, where folded notes swim

  clever as pilot fish—and white bottles of tablets

  are passed—orange aspirin,

  Extra Strength and Aleve.

  By each woman a bag;

  in each bag a billfold closes over a window

  into another country’s house—fat grandson,

  rice-powdered daughter.

  Some windows are vacant.

  No one keeps the brothel’s ceiling fan;

  or the infant’s mouth sewn shut.

  On the factory floor all day, the tiny feet

  are encased in embroidered shoes flimsy

  as those you get buried in. They stomp down

  on the machines’ accelerators,

  making the guises fit, never staying in one place.

  OVERDUE PARDON FOR MOTHER WITH KNIFE

  Some nights I startle up from sleep to gasp down

  your death again like a draft of venom,

  and feel I’m five, and see your flame-eyed shape

  raise the knife you failed

  to bury in my chest—whose gleam can still flash

  across some desert in me, searing me awake.

  I no longer curse that hand, as I once did,

  but glorify the force that stayed it, set the blade

  aside. Last week in the city you loved most

  (the Paradise my birth stole you from),

  I paused at a shop window

  where spring heels floated

  above staggered pedestals, as if tiptoeing

  some drunken stair to the invisible.

  Through the mist barrier,

  your stare became a flicker

  in the glass; then holding my face,

  as if I were a gift, your hands (which grow now

  on the ends of my own arms). It was me,

  astonished, inside you.

  Again in the chest, the heart’s aperture (not

  a dagger slot) opened. There

  was the odd resolve I found in youth—

  to guzzle down breath like sweet spirits,

  as if a pillow just slid off my face.

  DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE RESURRECTION

  From the far star points of his pinned extremities,

  cold inched in—black ice and blood ink—

  till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void

  even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,

  the human stare buried in his face.

  He ached for two hands made of meat

  he could reach to the end of.

  In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart

  began to bang on the stiff chest’s door,

  and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now

  it’s your limbs he longs to flow into—

  from the sunflower center in your chest

  outward—as warm water

  shatters at birth, rivering every way.

  A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON

  I have this son who assembled inside me

  during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,